5 Things You Don’t Want to Think About, and 20 Things Waiters Don’t Want You To Know

Want to ruin a kid's day? Tell em what is in their Jello.

So today you get two lists of fairly interesting things. I like lists because it makes posting about them easier and someone else is using their memory space. Anyway, the first list is about 5 delicious foods with disgusting ingredients. I’m Cantonese, and we eat everything on the Earth with its back to the sun, so this stuff doesn’t really bother me, but it might ruin the food for you.

5 Delicious Foods with Gross (not really) Ingredients

1. Jello is made out of animal skin and bones. Basically, to get that gelatinous boing boing texture you need to boil down animal skin, bones, and connective tissue. Might make you think next time you are in the hospital and reach for that Jello cup as the least disgusting thing on your tray.

2. Sweetbreads are delicious. I’ve known what they are made of and I love them. They taste great. For those of you who don’t know, it is made from pancreas and thymus glands of a calf or lamb. Yep, Bambi never tasted so great. If you still think sweet breads is a type of loaf I wonder why you are even on my site.

3. Barboca, never had it. Supposedly, it is made out of cow face, which to me sounds delicious. I had cow cheek once at Bouchon in Vegas, if it is anything like that serve me up some of Bessie’s face.

4. Menudo, another thing I have never had, but being in Hawaii we have plenty of tripe stew. I don’t care for tripe, not because the taste, but more of the texture.

5. Worcestershire Sauce is made from anchovies. I’m kind of ambivalent about that fact. In general, I don’t care for small, salty fish. However, Worcestershire in Caesar dressing or a variety of other dressings, sauces, etc . . . is great. If we must sacrifice Nemo’s friends for that, then so be it.

20 Secrets Your Waiter Won’t Tell You

Thank goodness for Iphones and their tip calculator apps . . . even better having an accountant as a friend.

Don’t work in the food industry, but want to know what’s going on back there in the kitchen? Well, the link above gives some secrets about what’s going on with your food handlers. I’m not going to comment about it, it’s an interesting thing to read to gain perspective. The only thing I am going to comment on is tipping.

In general, I try to leave 15%  and understand waiters and servers work their butts. That being said, and may be it is because I’m on the other side, I don’t like feeling obligated to leave a tip. I don’t think it is something people are entitled to. I can say this because as an attorney we cannot collect funds from a client until we have earned it. I also hate that they pool their tips because sometimes one waiter is working hard and the other one is dogging it. Don’t cover for the other person’s flaws.

Anyway, I wouldn’t mind paying more money to a restaurant if waiters had higher wages like they do in Japan. In general, I enjoy that Japan has a great service culture and you are not expected to tip. I find this totally convenient to the customer, and that is what it is all about. You are in a service industry, you provide service, not cold meat or overcharged credit cards (btw, I highly suggest you don’t do that if you are a server and reading this post). That’s my rant on tipping, and no I’m not like Rachael Ray. I don’t leave like 52 cents, I round-up to the next dollar.